Strategy Board

The strategy phase plays out on a board of hexagonal tiles — a 10×10 grid. Crucially, every hex has two independent lanes: Open Force and Hidden Force. The genre you built names them (a seafaring world might call them Navy and Buccaneers), but mechanically they are two parallel boards stacked on the same tiles. You can own a hex on one lane, both, or neither.

Each tile you hold is worth its coins on that lane. Your score on a lane is simply the sum of coins across every tile you control there. Some terrain is worth more — so where you fight matters as much as how much.

You don't move pieces around — you spend cards earned from how well you answered the round's problems. Every card has a mode, a target lane, a value (1–3), and an initiative (timing). There are three modes:

When two players target the same tile, the engine resolves it with a fixed tiebreaker: initiative, then quality, then value, then mode (Capture beats Place), and finally a deterministic coin-flip from the round seed — so a replay always produces the same result.

This is the heart of the game. When you land a Place or Capture, the engine scans all six directions from that tile. If you've closed off a contiguous run of enemy stones between two of your own, the entire run flips to your color — Reversi-like flipping on a hex grid. Run length is never capped.

Strongholds and capitals are immune and break the line — a run stops at them without flipping them. A friendly Signal network can shield a run from being flipped (see Networks). Traps that spring also trigger a bracket scan from the hex they seize.

Strongholds are the board's tentpoles — five per game, spread apart and split among the factions at setup (some start neutral). They block Place entirely, and only a Value-2+ Capture can take one. Because a stronghold is a single physical object, capturing it flips ownership on both lanes simultaneously — the lone exception to lane independence.

Capitals are your faction's permanent anchors, one per lane. They can never be captured or flipped, and like strongholds they break enemy runs that try to pass through them.

Three special tiles are scattered on the board, each helping whoever owns it:

• Relay — grants +1 claim budget to its owner's Place on the matching lane.
• Signal — shields a bracketed run from flipping, but only when the tower is owned by someone other than the attacker. Your own Signal never turns on you, and an empty one shields nothing.
• Smuggler — reserved for a future tuning pass; no mechanical effect today.

Each network affects exactly one lane. Its badge glows amber on the lane it works on and turns gray on the lane it doesn't — so you can tell at a glance whether it's live for the lane you're looking at.

Each round runs in the same order:

1. Problems — you get up to two situations to respond to in prose.
2. Judgment — each response is scored and turned into reward cards.
3. Hand — your cards are culled to your best three (quality and value weighted).
4. Planning— you pick a card and a target tile for each. You can't see what opponents are doing.
5. Resolution — all moves are gathered and the engine resolves deterministically: traps plant first, then Place and Capture, then bracket flips, then any world event.
6. Replay & narration — you watch the round play out, with prose written over what actually happened. The engine is the authority; the story follows it, never the reverse.

Your score is the sum of your coins across both lanes. Win conditions are styled by the world you built — highest total, a perfect balance between lanes, dominance of a single lane — but underneath, it always comes down to the tiles you hold when the game ends. When it does, the fog lifts and the full board is revealed.